Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game

Welcome to the GM's Day sale! From now through March 9th, this title has been marked down by 30%! For more values, visit our GM's Day sale page.

"What I'm saying is that GMs out here need this book. You may be fine coming up with awesome NPCs on your own and don't think you need something like this, and what I'm telling you is that this book is more than just a thousand characters, it's a million stories." -- Dave Chalker, Critical Hits review

Playing a character is like putting on a mask: Slip on a mask, and you become someone else.

This book presents 1,000 “masks” — non-player characters that are fun to play, and that your players will never forget. Featuring a foreword by gaming industry legend Wolfgang Baur, Masks is the ultimate NPC resource.

Think of your favorite character from a game, book, or movie. What makes them memorable? It’s not their Strength score, or how many hit points they have — it’s who they are as a person: what they look like, how they act, their personality, and what drives them.

Using a simple but powerful template that features Appearance, Roleplaying, Personality, Motivation, Background, and Traits, Masks provides the core elements of a thousand great characters. Masks NPCs are designed to be used on the fly, no prep required — but with enough depth to be used when planning adventures, as well.

Within this massive collection you’ll find the resources you need to portray vivid NPCs in your games:

Fantasy, science fiction, and modern NPCs: 333 of each (334 in fantasy), all easily adaptable to any genre and any RPG

Roles and traits: Every NPC has a role — villain, ally, or neutral — and is categorized by traits like famous, criminal, and warrior

Clear, useful game mastering advice: Masks covers re-skinning NPCs to fit other genres, making your portrayals memorable, and more

Handy tools: NPCs are indexed by trait, name, and author; an appendix lists groups like Tavern Patrons and Spaceport Denizens; and Masks provides over 1,900 names in an easy-to-use format

No game mechanics: These system-neutral NPCs can be used in any RPG

Like all Engine Publishing titles, Masks includes four versions of the book: DRM-free, bookmarked, hyperlinked PDF plus EPUB, MOBI, and plain text.

Want to learn more about Masks? You can download a free 17-page PDF excerpt of the book (including 18 ready-to-use NPCS) and read more reviews on the Engine Publishing website.

I found some samples of Eureka and Masks on Engine's website and was very impressed with the information, samples, and ideas provided, so I decided to buy the full ebook for both. This book is very well written and provides lots of easily NPCs with [...]

My homebrew campaign is too different to use most published FRP resources, but I found many usable NPCs in this product. The personalities have interesting motives and yet are highly adaptable. Also, the included text version allows me to easily copy [...]

This book was good. Thousands of NPC-ideas, funny and epic, good and evil, everything you need. Some of this NPC were so funny, that I couldn't stopped laughing. I can only recommend it for every game master who needs many NPC. [...]

This book’s subtitle doesn’t exaggerate. The volume really does contain 1,000 NPC write-ups across three common RPG genres: fantasy, sci-fi, and modern. Within each genre, NPCs are sorted into three categories: villains, neutral, and allies. Each [...]

I'm a fan of these types of supplements that allow me to pull a character out of thin air when my mind is feeling less than creative. The book has advice, obviously, for creating interesting NPCs. Maybe more useful for me is the list after list after [...]

These products were created by scanning an original printed edition. Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher.

For PDF download editions, each page has been run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to attempt to decipher the printed text. The result of this OCR process is placed invisibly behind the picture of each scanned page, to allow for text searching. However, any text in a given book set on a graphical background or in handwritten fonts would most likely not be picked up by the OCR software, and is therefore not searchable. Also, a few larger books may be resampled to fit into the system, and may not have this searchable text background.

For printed books, we have performed high-resolution scans of an original hardcopy of the book. We essentially digitally re-master the book. Unfortunately, the resulting quality of these books is not as high. It's the problem of making a copy of a copy. The text is fine for reading, but illustration work starts to run dark, pixellating and/or losing shades of grey. Moiré patterns may develop in photos. We mark clearly which print titles come from scanned image books so that you can make an informed purchase decision about the quality of what you will receive.

Original electronic format

These ebooks were created from the original electronic layout files, and therefore are fully text searchable. Also, their file size tends to be smaller than scanned image books. Most newer books are in the original electronic format. Both download and print editions of such books should be high quality.